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Chapter 23
“Where are we going?” 10-year-old Billy Slinger asked his father.
“Someplace important,” Tim Slinger said.
Billy looked out the window as their Lincoln luxury car thumped along a narrow gravel road. On each side of the road were fields filled with rows of tiny green plants. He wondered what could be so important out here—in the middle of nowhere—as they quickly passed by a windowless, paintless, abandoned farmhouse.
A few miles later, Tim slowed down and turned into an old, dirt driveway that was overgrown with tall grass. Billy saw the skeleton of a two-story farmhouse, with weeds growing through the boards of its large front porch. Is this what Dad brought me to see? Billy thought to himself.
Tim drove past the farmhouse to a huge, sagging, weather-beaten barn. He stopped the car next to the barn’s large, broken sliding door.
“What’re we doing here?” Billy asked.
“This is where I lived when I was your age,” Tim said.
Billy opened his door, got out and met his father next to the barn door. “How could you live in a place like this?” he asked.
“It wasn’t like this when I lived here,” Tim said. “It was full of life. It had a purpose.”
“Was it painted?” Billy asked.
“No, that much is still the same,” Tim answered, happy over the thought that something hadn’t changed on his family’s old farm. “Come on—let’s go inside.”
Tim reached for the rusted handle.
“You sure it’s safe?” Billy asked.
“It was never safe,” Tim said. “But we’ll be fine.”
He leaned against the door to force it open against the squeaking, rusted hinges. Billy hesitated for a moment then followed his father through the old door.
It was quiet, dim and dusty inside. Golden beams of light came through holes from missing boards in the sides of the barn, and also across the empty caverns of the hayloft. Some startled pigeons exploded from the rafters, shattering the silence with their wildly beating wings and escaping through the frame of a missing loft window.
“This way,” Tim said. He walked toward some concrete steps that went up into a room to their left. “This is where we stored the milk until the truck came and picked it up. There was a 1,000-gallon stainless-steel cooler sitting right here.”
“Was that a lot of milk?” Billy asked.
“Not enough for us to live on,” Tim said, explaining that the milk sold didn’t cover all of the family’s expenses.
Billy looked around at the decaying surroundings, spotting some rusted pipes on one wall and some bare electrical wires running down another wall to a plug dangling just off the floor.
“Did the milk come in through the pipes?” Billy asked.
“No, it went out to the truck through the pipes,” Tim said. “We carried it by hand from the milking parlor to the tank. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Billy followed his father out of the storage room, across the center section of the barn and down a set of stone steps into a much larger room.
“When I was four, I rode my tricycle down these steps and broke my nose,” Tim said.
Billy stooped down to study the steps closely.
“What are you doing?” Tim asked.
“Seeing if there are any blood stains left,” Billy said.
Tim laughed then patted Billy on the head. “That was 47 years ago. The stains are long gone, but my nose still bleeds real easy if I bump it hard.”
Billy walked the rest of the way down the steps and spotted a row of 20 steel structures in the milking parlor. They looked like traps to him. “What are those?”
“Those are steel bars. We used the small pens to keep the cows from moving around while we milked them. They stuck their heads through like this,” Tim said, stepping through one set of vertical bars, “so they could eat the grain we put in front of them.”
“Okay, but how did you keep them in?” Billy asked.
“Well, then we closed the bars like this,” Tim said, grabbing the bar that was made to slide over the cow’s neck. But the bar wouldn’t move. “This bar kept the cows from getting out or hurt while they were being milked. I guess it’s so old now, it’s stuck,” Tim said.
“Did you milk all the cows, Dad?” Billy asked.
“No. My job was at the other end, over here,” Tim said. He stepped out to a shallow gutter in the concrete floor. “This is where the cows pooped while they ate. My job was cleaning it out after every milking.”
Billy jumped back, away from the gutter. “Yuck! How could you stand it? Didn’t it smell gross?!”
“It wasn’t the worst job I had, but I did hate it,” Tim said. “Aunt Dana used to call me ‘Poop Slinger.’ ”
“Poop Slinger!” Billy shouted then giggled.
“Don’t you ever tell your mother my nickname. Understand?” Tim said.
“I won’t.”
Tim pointed to a pile of rotting boards in a corner. “Over there is where the calf pen used to be. Patsy was my personal responsibility from the day she was born.”
Billy stared at the pile of boards while he thought about having a pet calf. “How do you play with a pet cow?” he asked.
“You don’t play with it. You feed it, clean out its pen, wash it off and brush it.”
Billy gave his dad a disgusted look. “You call that a pet?”
“I didn’t say she was a pet. I said she was my responsibility,” Tim said.
Billy walked to a hallway in the end of the barn. “What’s in there?”
“I’ll show you,” Tim said.
Billy followed his dad through the short hallway to a tall, curved wall with a line of three-foot-square holes running up its side. He stepped a little closer and looked up through an opening in the roof. The curved wall formed a cylinder like a huge, round oatmeal box.
“It’s called a silo,” Tim said. “We filled it full of chopped corn stalks and other feed in the summer to feed to the cows all winter.”
“How’d you keep the corn from falling out of the holes?” Billy asked.
Tim looked around the hallway then walked over and picked up a slab of wood. It was about the same size and shape as the holes in the curved wall and had two lever-like handles on it. He carried it over to the silo, inserted it into the lowest hole, twisted the handles to lock it in place, and then stepped back. “We put those in all the way up to the top when we filled it up. During winter as we emptied corn out of the silo, we took them out to get to the next lower level.”
Billy stared up at the top of the silo. To him, it was so tall that he was sure it was scraping the clouds. “How’d you get all the way up there when it was full?”
“We used the handles like a ladder,” Tim said as he grabbed one of them.
“Looks dangerous,” Billy said.
“Try doing it in the rain with a pitchfork in one hand. I fell down from the fourth level once and the tines of the fork fell on top of me, stabbing me right in the knee,” Tim said. “My leg was so badly injured that I spent the Fourth of July waving sparklers from the porch.”
Billy was stunned. “You could’ve been killed!”
“I heard that a lot. Let’s go back outside,” Tim said.
Billy followed his dad back through the milking parlor, up the stone steps and to the door. Then his dad stopped suddenly, turned around and stared into the rafters above. “Well I’ll be—it’s still there.”
“What is?” Billy asked.
His dad pointed a finger at a rotting piece of rope that was hanging down a few feet from the highest rafter. “The rope swing.”
Billy stared at it, confused. “How’d you swing on that?”
“It used to hang all the way to the floor. Aunt Dana and I would swing on it for hours,” Tim said.
“How’d it get up there?” Billy asked.
Tim started to smile as he remembered the day he tied the rope swing on the woode
n beam, but his mom blamed his dad for pulling the climbing stunt. “I crawled out on that rafter and tied it there.”
Billy’s eyes bugged out as he stared at the rafter in the shadows high above him. “You’re crazy!”
“I heard that a lot, too,” Tim said.
They went back to the car. Tim stared at the barn thoughtfully for a few minutes. Billy looked at his dad then at the barn, trying to figure out what he was staring at. “Do you wish you still lived here?” Billy asked.
“No, but I wish somebody lived here now, with children having the same experiences and learning the same lessons I learned growing up,” Tim said.
Billy shook his head in wonder. “It’s pretty amazing you became a senator after living here.”
Tim thought about it for a minute before answering. “No, it isn’t. The lessons I learned here are why I was able to become a senator.”
“What lessons?” Billy asked.
Tim thought about all the adventures he had on the farm as a child, all the work, all the responsibility, all of the family members who came to visit, and how he felt when it all ended. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the car. “You get out of life what you put into it.”
Billy frowned as he looked back at the barn. “I don’t understand.”
“I know, but maybe seeing how I grew up will help you understand someday,” Tim said.
Billy studied the barn and the mess that surrounded it, wondering how he could ever understand what it meant to his father.
“There’s something else I don’t understand,” Billy said.
“What’s that?” Tim asked.
“Why was Patsy your responsibility if she wasn’t your pet?”
Tim smiled again as he remembered the first time he saw Patsy. “I saved her life when she was born.”
Billy thought he was going to throw up. “You didn’t give the cow mouth-to-mouth, did you?”
Tim laughed and put his arm around his son’s shoulders. “No, it’s a little more complicated than that. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”
“Home?” Billy asked.
“Nope, to the East Dairy outlet store for the best ice cream you’ve ever tasted,” Tim said.
They got into the car, backed out of the driveway and headed down the bumpy gravel road.
“Okay, tell me now. Tell me how you saved a cow’s life,” Billy said.
“Well, it all started the first time my dad showed me how a calf was born . . .”
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GLOSSARY
4-H Club > teaches farming and life skills to kids (return)
180-degree turn > turn and go in the opposite direction (return)
agape > wide open (return)
athleticism > being fit, strong and good at sports (return)
auction > a sale where people bid against each other on items for sale and the highest bidder wins (return)
auctioneer > the leader of an auction who talks really fast and tries to get bidders to bid higher on each item (return)
bellowed > to cry out or for a cow to moo loudly (return)
back forty > 40 acres of land, about the size of 40 football fields(return)
bidders > a person who offers to pay a certain price for something, often raising their bid when someone else offers a higher price for the same thing (return)
bovine > another name for a cow or bull (return)
briar patch > a bunch of weeds with lots of stickers (return)
bushel > a measurement equal to 64 pints or 8 gallons (return)
caper > a funny or crazy activity (return)
cat’s-eye boulders > larger clear glass marbles with a swirl of color inside that some think looks like a cat’s eye (return)
cinder block > concrete blocks that are stacked on top of each other (like bricks) to create walls for buildings (return)
coal > a black rock like charcoal burned to heat homes (return)
combine > A large farming machine used to harvest crops such as wheat (return)
confidently > being sure of one’s skills or knowledge (return)
consequences > the good or bad results from doing something to someone or to something (return)
cow chip > dried blob of cow poop (return)
Daisy 50-shot BB gun > spring-powered rifle that shoots small BBs; used mostly by kids learning gun safety and target practice (return)
dead run > running as fast as one can (return)
double-barrel > a shotgun with two barrels side-by-side most often used for hunting birds. (return)
drafty > having holes or gaps that allow cold air through (return)
ducts > metal tubes for square pipes that carry hot air from a furnace or heater to the different rooms of a house (return)
dusk > the time between when the sun sets and when it finally gets dark outside (return)
dynamite > an explosive often used on farms to remove large tree trunks from the ground and break up huge rocks (return)
embers > the hot and often glowing coals of a dying fire (return)
feed company > store that sells food such as hay for livestock (return)
fertilizer > natural products such as cow manure or special chemicals used to make plants grow faster and bigger (return)
feud > a long time argument or fight, often between neighbors (return)
furnace > a heater that burns coal, oil or gas and is used to heat a house or other building (return)
Gene Autry > known as the “singing cowboy,” he made many cowboy movies in the 1930s and 1940s and a TV western in the 1950s (return)
golden palomino > a horse having a yellow or golden-colored coat with a white or cream-colored mane and tail (return)
gored > to be stabbed in the body by a bull’s horn (return)
grate > heavy metal screen that allows air to pass through (return)
grazing > cattle or other livestock eating grass in a field (return)
gun-shy > a hunting dog that jumps, cries or tries to hide everytime a nearby hunter shoots his gun (return)
harvest > cut, pick or in some other way remove crops growing in a field or orchard (return)
hay chaff > small pieces of hay, straw, corn husks or other plants (return)
hayloft > an upstairs area in a barn used to store hay (return)
Holstein > a black-and-white dairy cow (return)
horseshoes > game where horseshoes are tossed attempting to land them around or very near a steel pin stuck in the ground (return)
host > the person holding or in charge of an event or party to which people are invited (return)
insulators > often made of glass or plastic and used to hold electric wires along a fence (return)
intimidating > frightening or scary (return)
loft > a small room or space above the main floor of a building (return)
logging chain > heavy chain used to wrap around and move logs (return)
manure > cow poop, often used as fertilizer for plants (return)
manure spreader > a machine that breaks up and spreads cow manure on a farm field for use as fertilizer (return)
military-grade > high quality that can be used by the military (return)
milking machine > used to take milk from cows using tubes and suction (return)
milking parlor > area for holding cows for milking with a milking machine (return)
molasses > thick brown liquid made from raw sugar (return)
mudroom > small room or porch where wet and muddy boots and clothes can be removed before walking into a house (return)
nitro > short name for nitroglycerin, a liquid explosive also found in dynamite (return)
pasture > a grass field where cows and other animals can graze (return)
periscope > a long tube with mirrors inside that allows someone to see up and over something without being seen themselves, such as from a submarine (return)
rafter beams > the long and thick pieces of wood that hold up a barn’s roof (
return)
ravine > a narrow gorge or canyon with steep sides (return)
referee > a person who makes sure everyone follows the rules of a game (return)
resourcefulness > being quick and creative in solving a problem (return)
The Cow-Pie Chronicles Page 12